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Student reporter Reade Levinson travels to Mongolia in hopes of witnessing a practice known as sky burial, in which bodies of the dead are prepared for the afterlife. But as Reade learns in her journey, in Mongolia the forces of urbanization, modernization, and environmental change may be threatening this sacred ritual. READ MORE

Listen up, because you never know when a sound will change your life. Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton tells us the story of how he became “The Soundtracker,” an unorthodox career choice that has led him around the planet three times in pursuit of the last pristine soundscapes. Journey along with Hempton from tropical jungles to the frozen North as he records the music from the solar-powered jukebox that is Earth.

Image adapted from Randy Storey

This episode was produced by Leslie Chang, Mike Osborne, and Miles Traer.
Additional music by Kevin MacLeod (License available here)

The very idea of an Anthropocene suggests that the world is changing faster than ever before. And a growing number of historians, archeologists, and geologists are looking at our modern world in the context of deep time to place the rapid changes in their proper context. In today’s show, Ian Morris discusses how societies have developed through all of human history – from Neanderthals to iPhones – and points out some trends we can extract and investigate from archeological data. Specifically, Morris explains how geography drives human social development, but development changes the very meaning of geography. If that sounds a little complicated… well, it is. But we speak with Ronan Arthur about the Native American Navajo as a sort of case study of this geography/social development concept.

This episode was produced by Leslie Chang, Mike Osborne, and Miles Traer.
Additional music by Kevin MacLeod (License available here)